Breathing in Serenity - Compendium of Chinese Landscape Painting 13

Author: Shao Qi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-05-01
Features: Landscape painting is a unique product of Chinese civilization. For over a thousand years, it has served as a major category of Chinese painting and a concentrated embodiment of its artistic achievements, as well as an important way for the Chinese people to observe nature, interpret the world, and carry its conceptual significance. With distinct cultural characteristics and rich expressive forms, it has participated in the construction of the artistic spirit and humanistic atmosphere of the Chinese nation. Since the 20th century, with the profound changes in society, the cultural penetration of landscape painting has weakened to some extent, but it still provides and continuously nourishes the values and forms for later generations. It deeply embeds itself in the contemporary era through its dual effects—acting on both the practical artistic context and the subjective cognitive structure. Comprehensive Compendium of Chinese Landscape Painting organizes this vibrant and diverse history of landscape painting in an illustrated and systematic manner. What it reveals is not only the process of the emergence and development of landscape painting, nor only the trajectory of the artists and artworks associated with it, but also the cultural soil on which landscape painting thrives, as well as the subtle and evolving relationship between each generation of people who need landscape painting and the painting itself. To facilitate reading and use, the entire work is organized along the temporal sequence of landscape painting development as the longitude and the fluctuation of value forms as the latitude, divided into thirty-four volumes. Each volume is an independent chapter yet interconnected and responsive to one another. This book, Spiritual Freedom in the Heart, is the thirteenth volume, primarily discussing the artistic styles of landscape paintings by Yuan Dynasty figures such as Huang Gongwang, Fang Congyi, Ni Zan, and others.